About the book

Part poem, part story, a mixture of image and text with a dash of autofiction, Heimlich Unheimlich probes the concepts of home and belonging. The context is the aftermath of the Second World War and the intertwining stories of the childhoods of two women both named after different types of cloth. Hessian is a German girl born towards the end of the Second World War, whose father fought in the German army. She migrates with her family to Australia when she is still a child where she suffers some discrimination because she is German. She eventually becomes an artist. Muslin is born into a Jewish family in England after the war. She is a violinist who subsequently becomes a poet and migrates to Australia as an adult. Her family, who live in the shadow of the holocaust and are unforgiving of Nazi Germany, are preoccupied with preserving a Jewish ethnicity. Both Hessian and Muslin are shaped by, but also rebel against, the cultural environments in which they grow up.

Heimlich Unheimlich suggests strong links between Muslin and Hessian, despite their contrasting, even conflicting, childhoods. It explores, through photographic collages, the inter-generational aftereffects of the Second World War and the shadow it cast of personal and collective trauma. The work has considerable relevance to contemporary Australia and global issues concerning war, migration, displacement and ethnic identity.

What people are saying

Weaving turns environmental matter into usable material, and it’s a strong image in Heimlich Unheimlich. There’s a hint of bildungsroman to the weaving process: socialising raw living matter into workable yarn, then weaving yarn into usable cloth. Woven story is very much the mode of Heimlich Unheimlich. Hessian and Muslin are readily identifiable threads, and there are others: the girls’ families, cultures left behind, and the Anglophone cultures the children grow into. World War II is backing material, always present as a shaping and locating influence. War as raw material for some, harvest for others: lives cut at the root and people displaced. Some effort of the hands is needed to restore them to flower. As an effort of the hands, there’s something very life-affirming in Heimlich Unheimlich. Smith and Karl-Spence are women born on opposite sides of one of history’s worst conflicts, terrible in scale and cruelty. They find common human experiences—displacement, longing—and make something beautiful out of it all.

 — Chris Arnold, Zero Day, PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2022

Gallery Installation

Heimlich Unheimlich also exists in the form a gallery installation. Photographic documentation from the exhibition at the Broadhurst Gallery, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, 2020:

The installation has three components.  Firstly, it comprises polyester chiffon hangings digitally printed with word and images.

Secondly, it includes hand-stitched objects reminiscent of body parts: these are made of hessian and muslin and are displayed partly wrapped in digitally printed cloth.

Thirdly, the gallery installation incorporates a video which is also an independent work of art. The video contains spoken text that is only a tiny fraction of the text in the book and a different outlay of the images.

The original conception of the video was devised by Sieglinde Karl-Spence (image) and Hazel Smith (text) with digital editing by Claire Grocott. Image montage and processing is by Roger Dean; composed and improvised sound is by Roger Dean and austraLYSIS. The performers are Hazel Smith (text), Sandy Evans (saxophone), Phil Slater (trumpet) and Greg White (computers). The sound is from an austraLYSIS performance at the MARCS institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, 2019.  

Claire Grocott and Claire Letitia Reynolds were technical assistants and collaborators in the making of the visual images. Graphic design for the installation, video and book was by Claire Grocott.

About the creators

Hazel Smith is a poet, performer, electronic writer and academic. She has published six volumes of poetry including The Erotics of Geography, Tinfish Press, 2008, Word Migrants, Giramondo, 2016 and Ecliptical, ES-Press, Spineless Wonders, 2022.  She has published numerous performance and multimedia works, and has performed and presented her work extensively internationally, has been commissioned by the ABC to write several works for radio, and has been co-recipient of numerous Australia Council for the Arts grants. She is a founding member of the multimedia ensemble austraLYSIS.  In 2018, with Will Luers and Roger Dean, she was awarded first place in the Electronic Literature Organisation’s Robert Coover prize. In 2023 her collaboration with Luers and Dean, Dolphins in the Reservoir, was shortlisted for the UK New Media Writing Prize.

Hazel is an Emeritus Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. She has authored several academic books including Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Liverpool University Press, 2000, The Writing Experiment, Allen and Unwin, 2005 and The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship, Routledge, 2016. With Roger Dean she co-edited Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Her website is at http://www.australysis.com

Sieglinde Karl-Spence spent her childhood years in her native Germany before emigrating to Australia with her family in 1953. Sieglinde trained as a jeweller, graduating in Jewellery and Silversmithing from Middlesex Polytechnic, London in 1978. Since the late 1980s her practice has focused on installation and performance, including works of a site-specific, transitory nature such as ‘Healing Mandala – 365 offerings’, Mildura Arts Festival, 1996 and ‘Red Bead Seed Offering’, Botanic Gardens, Darwin, 1997. Sieglinde has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, including at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia in 1992 and 2002 and in Crossing Borders: History, Culture and Identity in Australian Contemporary Textile Art, 1995, a major survey of Australian textiles that toured throughout the United States of America.

Recently, Sieglinde has focused on making small transient mandala installations. Her work is represented in most of the major galleries in Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, NT; Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania and Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, Sydney, N.S.W. Her website is at http://sieglindekarl-spence.com.au

Other works by the creators

Hazel Smith: Selected publications

Poetry Volumes

Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-1990, Sydney:  Butterfly Books, 1991.

Keys Round Her Tongue: short prose, poetry and performance texts, Sydney: Soma Publishing, 2000.

The Erotics of Geography, poetry, performance texts, new media works, Kaneohe, Hawaii:  Tinfish Press, (with CD-Rom), 2008.

Word Migrants, Sydney: Giramondo Publishing, 2016.  

Ecliptical, Sydney: ES-Press, Spineless Wonders, 2024.

Hazel Smith: Academic Publications

With Roger T. Dean, Improvisation, Hypermedia and the Arts Since 1945, London and New York: Harwood Academic, 1997.

Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005.

With Roger T. Dean (eds.) Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

 The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship: intermedia, voice, technology, cross-cultural exchange, New York and London: Routledge, 2016.

Sieglinde Karl-Spence: Selected Exhibitions

Unfamiliar Territory exhibition, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art

Gallery of South Australia, 1992.

‘Demigod,’ Crossing Borders: History, Culture and Identity in Australian

Contemporary Textile Art, 1995.

‘Healing Mandala – 365 offerings,’ Mildura Arts Festival, 1996.  

‘Red Bead Seed Offering’, Botanic Gardens, Darwin, 1997.

‘Edible-lei’ project in collaboration with Gay Bilson, Adelaide Festival of the Arts, 2002.

‘Five Mandalas – The Web of Life’, Burnie City Art Gallery, 2004.

‘Song of the Earth Mandala – 365 Offerings’, commissioned work for the W.P. Holman Clinic, Launceston General Hospital, 2011.

‘Healing Mandala– 365 Offerings’, Hazelhurst Gallery, 2013.

Joint exhibitions: Hazel Smith and Sieglinde Karl-Spence

‘TranceFIGUREd Spirit’, Installation/Performance with dancer Graham Jones, ArtHouse, Ritchies Mill Arts Centre, Launceston, 1990.

‘Secret Places’ with Ron Nagorcka and Kate Hamilton, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania, 1996; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania, 1996; Waverley City Art Gallery, 1997; Mildura Arts Centre, 1997.

‘DarkLight’, Design Tasmania Wood Collection Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania, 2002.

‘Heimlich Unheimlich’, Broadhurst Gallery, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, Sydney, 2020; the Edith Cowan University Gallery 25, Perth, 2021 and the John Mullins Memorial Art Gallery, Dogwood Crossing, Miles, Queensland, 2023.

Joint Previous Publications: Hazel Smith and Sieglinde Karl-Spence

Hazel Smith, Sieglinde Karl and Graham Jones, TranceFIGUREd Spirit, Sydney and London: Soma Publishing, 1990.

Sieglinde Karl, Hazel Smith, Kate Hamilton, Ron Nagorcka, Secret Places, Launceston: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, 1996.